Victor Lustig (eBook)

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BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

Victor Lustig was not born either in New York City or Paris on 4 January 1891. The date and one or other of the locations appear in several records, primarily rap sheets, circulated during his lifetime. Perhaps they help form an appropriately hazy starting point for a career dedicated to the art of deception. He certainly never went out of his way to correct the misapprehension, which arose out of a combination of clerical error and his own reluctance to dwell on his immigrant past or admit his real age. On the day in May 1935 when he was detained in New York, he signed a statement with the inscription: ‘Count Robert V. Miller-Lustig, b. Jan 4 ’91, NYC’, and those details duly appeared in the indictment read out in the federal court proceedings against him later in the autumn, possibly giving him a last sardonic laugh at the expense of the authorities he had so successfully misled for much of the previous twenty-five years.

Victor Lustig wasn’t even his real name, of course. Somehow aptly, his parents christened him Robbe, today’s Robert, and as a family they generally went by variants of Molnar, Mueller or Miller. A land tax assessment issued to their home in December 1897 is addressed to one ‘L. Muller’, although in those days spelling was still generally as flexible as in pre-Chaucerian Britain. Perhaps it hardly matters in the case of a man who eventually enjoyed some forty-five different aliases.

Victor Lustig, as we’ll call him, was born, the middle of three children, in the small family home in Hostinné, Bohemia, one of those marginal places in central Europe that flit back and forth between countries depending on the fortunes of war. At the time, it was a hamlet of some 6,000 souls, set close to the junction of the Elbe and Čistá rivers in what is now the Czech Republic. In 1841, Hostinné had also been the birthplace of Karel Klíč, the inventor of the photogravure process that in later years made millionaires of several counterfeiters of the world’s banknotes, Lustig himself prominently among them. In the late nineteenth century the town was spread out around a number of bustling squares in a haphazard jumble of shops, bazaars, tenements, bungalows, bridges and richly aromatic livestock pens. There was also a Gothic city hall set up on a rocky spur, fronted by a gold-faced clock tower and topped by domes pointed like witches’ hats. Visiting Hostinné in 1893, Klíč wrote of the town’s striking architectural contrasts, ‘a glittering visual patisserie’ of soaring medieval spires and ‘crude wooden shacks with animal swamps that bubbled and stank like stewing tripe’. Gritty snow hillocks formed every winter along the unpaved streets, and sewage ran raw and braided in the gutters. Many of the town’s adult inhabitants were illiterate, or semi-literate at best, and had been born as serfs. In all, it was the kind of place that teaches a boy to be practical while it forces him to dream of other, headier realities. Lustig was born here on the Saturday morning of 4 January 1890. There is no evidence that either he or any of his family were ever granted the title ‘Count’.

His father, Ludwig, was of ‘low peasant stock’, Victor later recalled, although other accounts insist that he served as the mayor of Hostinné. Perhaps both versions are true. It’s known that the family lived in a four-roomed stone house on Tyrsovy, a narrow street winding up by the river north of the main market square, and that neither the home itself nor the immediate vicinity had any pretension to elegance. On the day Victor was born the weather broke in a thick shawl of snow. Jugs of river water had to be boiled over a peat fire in the parlour to help with the delivery. At that time of the year, a greasy, yellow fog often descended by day, leaving spectacular rime deposits on Hostinné’s streets. At night the Čistá froze solid and the cold seemed to have the pygmy’s power of shrinking skin.

Ludwig was a small, squat, cynically humorous man. Whatever his true status in life, he doesn’t always make a sympathetic figure in Lustig biographies. We know that he was relatively well groomed, irrepressibly proud of his dark cavalryman’s moustache, responsible and apparently honest, but also that he was gruff, bad-tempered and stingy – a ‘clenched fist’ in one account. Ludwig’s granddaughter Betty remembered him as a tradesman, dealing mainly in pipes and tobacco, and adds that he had forced the young Victor to take violin lessons, which he hated. In a distressing scene, she writes that following one clash of wills on the subject, ‘Ludwig carefully raised the instrument, pointing to the ceiling, and, with all the force of his more than average strength, every muscle in his body taut, brought it down on the boy’s head.’

Ludwig had, it’s agreed, a way with women, a talent Victor would inherit from him. Mostly, though, the son consciously tried to be as unlike his father as possible. Where Ludwig was frugal, Victor prided himself on spending money the second he got it, and often even earlier. The boy was told that the novels of Émile Zola and his school were corrupting filth, and at the age of 8 he had to sign a solemn oath that he would abstain from alcohol and faithfully attend the Catholic Church. The elder Lustig was ‘used to dominating all scenes in which he appeared,’ Betty wrote. Unsurprisingly, Victor never forgot the violin incident: for the rest of his life authority figures would rarely evoke anything but contempt. In later years he complained bitterly that Ludwig had frequently thrashed him ‘unmercifully with a bull whip’, although in the rural Bohemia of those days severe beatings of children weren’t uncommon, being considered good for the soul. The violence apparently extended to Ludwig’s docile wife Amelia, known as Fanny, fifteen years younger than her husband, and if true must have made an indelible impression on Victor.

Weighing up the evidence, it seems fair to say that the family were of modest means, certainly, but not the absolute dregs of Habsburg society as it was constituted in the 1890s. Ludwig’s granddaughter says that his tobacco business often took him on lucrative trips as far afield as Zürich or Prague. At the age of 7, Victor accompanied his father on the train to Paris, a city that later struck him as exquisite in its central areas, but elsewhere a ‘sad, soiled place that slithered around in a sea of immorality’, to which in time he duly contributed. Victor was considered bright but wayward as a child. Early on he showed signs of being both self-willed and resistant to the discipline of regular work. He lasted only one day at the Hostinné infants’ school, where he was expelled for saying ‘Leck mich am Arsch’ – roughly translated as ‘Kiss my ass’ – to his female teacher. After that he transferred to a one-room establishment located 3 miles away down a dirt path in Čermná, which he reached each day on foot. Victor’s parents reportedly separated only a year later, when he was 8, although the Habsburg census taken in December 1900 shows all five family members, a mule and a 15-year-old ‘idiot-girl’ named Klara Muller – possibly a cousin – living together at the Tyrsovy residence.

Even at that early age there was something in the dark-eyed youngster’s look that set him apart from his schoolmates. In the form picture that year at Čermná he stands in the centre of the front row, looking several years older than his contemporaries, chin up, frowning. ‘We all liked him, but the teachers didn’t,’ his friend Karl Harrer wrote. ‘He had “guts”. He could impersonate different people’s voices, march[ing] around the play yard shouting mad army commands with a tin saucepan on his head. Somehow he seemed a lot wiser than us. I remember he was the first person who told me in detail about the difference between boys and girls, [which] was very impressive.’

Perhaps reflecting the authorities’ less appreciative view, Lustig’s July 1902 school report called him ‘Retarded morally, an idiot in other respects’. Such things tended to be more bluntly stated than they are today. At 13 he was tall and heavyset with an engaging smile that carried a glint of rebellion. Talented at boxing, he was not otherwise very athletically gifted. From early childhood he was a martyr to his sinuses, sometimes emitting a harsh, guttural snort that Harrer compared to the ‘violent peal of a blocked sewer’ as he painfully cleared his throat. Although Victor always seemed strong, he was sick a great deal, a reality he hid from his school friends. Migraines continued to plague him, his hands mysteriously swelled up in the summer months, and, on a trip to Prague, he fell and broke his collarbone. Nonetheless, he hated to miss even a day of school, where he had a perfect attendance record. Karl Harrer once watched in wonder as his friend came ‘bound[ing] up to the front gate one morning, like a dog off the leash, and then only minutes later, once out of view, slowly shuffled up a muddy back path to the latrine one limping step at a time’.

Harrer himself, who was a year younger, provided – in addition to Lustig’s little brother Emil – the necessary audience for the stream of fantasy he poured out. In what way Victor was to express his latent...